Archive for the ‘Antifa’ Category

Police in Pennsylvanias state capital said a member of the leftist antifa group known for assaulting supporters of Republican President Donald Trump at rallies across the country was arrested after using a flagpole with a silver nail at the top to hit a state troopers horse in the neck at a demonstration Saturday.

AuthoritieschargedLisa Joy Simon, 23, with aggravated assault to police, taunting a police animal, prohibited offensive weapons, obstruction to law enforcement function, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. She was arraigned and taken to Dauphin County Prison in lieu of $100,000 bail, WPMT-TV reported.

Harrisburg police said Simon was among antifa members protesting those marching against Islamic Shariah Law an event that took place in more than20 U.S. cities Saturday and drew similar counter-protests.

Shortly after 11:30 a.m. EDT, multiple mounted Pennsylvania State Police Troopers and Harrisburg police were attempting to control the crowd when police said Simon attacked a troopers horse named Sampson with the flag pole.

State police told PennLive other protesters were seen carrying weapons such as sharpened bamboo poles and baseball bats.

Police said the horse was able to continue working with minimal injury. Pennsylvania State Police on Wednesday told TheBlaze the alleged attack was a swipe against the horse and that the animals skin was not broken.

Heres what the South Jersey ANTIFA Facebook page had to say about the incident, according to WPMT:

A comrade was arrested while trying to demonstrate against an anti-Muslim rally in Harrisburg, PA. The charges are entirely fabricated and do not reflect what actually happened during the incident. The bail is set at an extraordinary $100,000. It is clear that this person is being held as a political prisoner, and we must make it known that we will not be intimidated by a militarized police, that we will remain resolute in standing by the values of our movement, and that we will continue to combat fascism wherever it attempts to spread.

A Philadelphia woman attending an ACT for America rally in Harrisburg was arrested last weekend when she allegedly struck a Pennsylvania State Police horse in the side of the neck with a flag pole.

According to police, Lisa Joy Simon, 23, was arrested on Saturday after she used a flag pole with a silver nail at the top of the pole to strike a police horse named Sampson in the neck at about 11:32 a.m.

Simon was in attendance, police said, at one of several marches held in protest of alleged Sharia law across the country last weekend organized by the conservative group ACT for America.

An ACT spokeswoman said Simon was not one of their members and was in attendance as part of a counterprotest.

“Our people are normally very respectful of the police. I dont think they would purposefully stab a police horse in the neck,” spokeswoman Carrie French said. “It really sounds out of character for our people. Other reports have said she was with Antifa.”

Law enforcement officials said the rally marchers headed north on North ThirdStreet into Harrisburgs midtown area, and multiple Pennsylvania State Police mounted units were working to keep the marchers from blocking the 1200 block of North SixthStreet.

At that time, police said, Simon struck the police horse, Sampson, in the neck and obstructed other officers from being able to move the crowd onto the sidewalk along that block. After the incident, police said that the officer and Sampson were able to continue to work after suffering only a minimal injury.

No, this is not a metaphorical analogy to that bloody conflict that killed approximately 620,000 Americans. It is an objective statement of the reality in America.

Since the election of 2016, the left has gone crazy. Their version of the tea party is called Resistance, and the spearhead of that is a loosely formed terrorist group called Antifa. Antifa is short for Anti-Fascist. The irony of their name is not lost on those who actually know history, as their tactics are straight from the fascist playbook.

In the past few months, these groups have repeatedly disrupted peaceful pro-Trump rallies. They have called for and used violence against people who support the president or disagree with them and even against members of the media who will report things Antifa doesnt want reported.

Just a few days ago, a woman associated with Antifa attacked a police horse, using a flagpole with nails extending from it. At the same incident in Pennsylvania, other Antifa terrorists had sharpened bamboo poles and baseball bats.

Conservatives and those perceived to be conservatives have been attacked. The weapons have included glitter-filled gel, urine bombs, chains, bicycle locks and baseball bats. As their violence becomes more intense, it is now only a question of when, not if, someone will be killed.

Violence is not limited to pro-Trump rallies. The same Antifa group has made college campuses virtually no-go zones for conservatives. Noted conservatives such as Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro cannot go onto many college campuses to speak without having their events disrupted to the point where they cannot go on.

If this violence continues, the choices are not good. The left-wing academic establishment has quickly surrendered to these groups. They are allowed to riot on campus and even given relief from homework and exams so they can riot.

Is there a solution short of a real, violent civil war in America?

California and Hawaii have recently announced that they would sign agreements with other nations so they could join the Paris climate change accord. Liberal states have this amazing ability to find things in the U.S. Constitution that people havent been able to find for over 200 years, but they ignore the plain language of the document that organizes the United States of America.

At this point, is there any way that America can hold together as a single, united country?

When states are wanting to sign their own treaties with other nations and when one-half of the political spectrum in this nation wants to strip the other half of its rights and engage in violence against them, survival seems improbable.

After Donald Trump was elected as president, the hashtag #Calexit started trending on social media. Members of the radical left pushed the idea of California leaving the United States. That idea was tried once before with less-than-great results, but maybe it is time for a peaceful solution that would allow California to leave the Union.

There was a time when Americans, despite their differences, clearly identified as Americans above all else. That time has now passed.

Judson Phillips is the founder of Tea Party Nation, one of the largest tea party groups in the country and the No. 1 national tea party site on the internet.

A Philadelphia member of Antifa, the anti-fascist protest group thats caused a number of incidents across the country in its effort to resist President Donald Trump, is in jail after she allegedly attacked and stabbed a Pennsylvania police horse.

The horse, Sampson, and his human partner were part of a small group of Pennsylvania State Trooper mounted police, performing crowd control at a March Against Sharia on Saturday.

Lisa Simon, an Antifa counter-protester of the March, reportedly attacked the horse with a flag pole that had a nail driven into one end in an effort to get the horse to run, causing chaos in the crowd, according to law enforcement.

Simon stabbed the horse in the neck with the weapon, but the horse was able to keep composure and continued to work despite his injury. Simon, realizing she had not made headway in her effort, then attempted to obstruct police from moving the crowd along the block where they were working.

She is now is facing a host of charges, including aggravated assault, illegally taunting a police animal, prohibited offensive weapons, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstruction of administrative law. She was arraigned Tuesday, and is currently being held on $100,000 bail.

Antifa, of course, disputes that Simon did anything and is urging their comrades-in-arms to rally to her defense on their Facebook page.

A comrade was arrested while trying to demonstrate against an anti-Muslim rally in Harrisburg, PA. The charges are entirely fabricated and do not reflect what actually happened during the incident, their statement says, going on to describe Simon as a political prisoner, and the charges as fabricated.

They also say they will continue to abide by the values of their movement, which include anti-corporatismwhich apparently doesnt include not posting on a heavily corporate social media network.

Sampson, the horse, is said to be recovering and is still able to work.

The origins of the word antifa shorthand for decentralized, militant street activism associated with its own aesthetic and subculture might be murky to most readers. Even in Germany, few know much about the popular forms of antifascist resistance that coined the term.

The movements short but inspiring political legacy proved too uncomfortable for both Cold War-era German states, and was ignored in schools and mainstream history. Today its legacy is almost entirely lost to the Left.

By 1945, Hitlers Third Reich lay physically destroyed and politically exhausted. Basic civil society ceased to function in many areas, as the Nazi grip on power faltered and regime supporters, particularly in the middle- and upper classes, realized that Hitlers final victory was a fantasy.

On the Left, many Communists and Social Democrats had either been outright murdered by the Nazis, or died in the ensuing war. The unimaginable human and material destruction wrought by Nazi rule killed millions and turned German society upside down, decimating the labor movement and murdering most of the countrys Jewish population. Millions who had supported or at least acquiesced to the regime including many workers and even some former socialists now faced a new beginning in unknown political terrain.

Yet despite its failure to stop Hitler in 1933 and veritable dismantling in subsequent years, Germanys socialist labor movement and its decidedly progressive traditions outlived Hitler in the factories of its industrial cities, and began gathering up the fragments as soon as open political activity became possible. As historian Gareth Dale describes:

Of all sectors of the population, it was industrial workers in the major towns that showed the greatest immunity to Nazism. Many trade unionists and socialists were able to maintain their traditions and beliefs, at least in some form, through the Nazi era. A courageous minority, including some 150,000 Communists, took part in illegal resistance. Wider layers avoided danger but were able to keep labour movement values and memories alive amongst groups of friends, in workplaces and on housing estates.

These groups, oftentimes launched from the aforementioned housing estates, were generally called Antifaschistische Ausschsse, Antifaschistische Kommittees, or the now famous Antifaschistische Aktion Antifa for short. They drew on the slogans and orientation of the prewar united front strategy, adopting the word Antifa from a last-ditch attempt to establish a cross-party alliance between Communist and Social Democratic workers in 1932. The alliances iconic logo, devised by Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists members Max Keilson and Max Gebhard, has been since become one of the Lefts most well-known symbols.

After the war, Antifas varied in size and composition across the former Reich, now divided into four zones of occupation, and developed in interaction with the local occupying power. Emerging seemingly overnight in dozens of cities, most formed immediately after Allied forces arrived, while some such as the group in Wuppertal liberated themselves in street battles with Hitler loyalists before the Allies could.

Pivotally, these circles were not spontaneous instances of solidarization between traumatized war survivors, but the product of Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Communist Party (KPD) veterans reactivating prewar networks. Albrecht Lein reports that the core of the Braunschweig Antifa was made up of KPD and SPD members in their forties and fifties who had avoided the front, though Catholic workers organizations and other forces were also involved.

The Antifa groups numbered between several hundred and several thousand active members in most cities, while the openly decried lack of youth involvement can be ascribed to twelve years of Nazi education and socialization, which annihilated the once widespread proletarian-socialist attitude among most young Germans. Though the material needs of war and reconstruction incorporated women into economic life in new ways, the male dominance characteristic of German society at the time was also reflected in the Antifa movement, which consisted largely (but not entirely) of men.

Antifas tended to focus on a combination of hunting down Nazi criminals and underground Nazi partisans (the so-called Werewolves) and practical concerns affecting the general population. Braunschweigs Antifa, for example, printed a twelve-point program demanding, among other things, the removal of Nazis from all administrative bodies and their immediate replacement with competent antifascists, liquidation of Nazi assets to provide for war victims, emergency laws to prosecute local fascists, and the reestablishment of the public health-care service. Typical of an organization led by socialists and thus keenly aware of the need for print media as an organizing medium, the programs twelfth and final point consisted bluntly of a Daily newspaper.

Although surviving records indicate that many Antifas were dominated by the KPD, the political mood in the early months was far from the Third Period adventurism of the late Weimar period. Across the board, local Antifas were motivated by a desire to learn from the mistakes of 1933 and build a non-sectarian labor movement bridging divisions. This was buoyed by a widespread sense at the wars end that the horrors of Nazism had been a result of the instability and inequality of capitalism, and that a new, egalitarian economic system was needed for the postwar order.

Demands for nationalization of industry and other left-wing policies were widespread. Even the forced marriage between KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the Soviet zone drew on this sentiment and recruited many former oppositionists in the first year. In British-occupied Hamburg, a joint KPD-SPD action committee convened in July 1945 with broad support from their respective memberships to declare:

The will to merge into a powerful political party lives in the hearts of the millions of supporters of the once warring German workers parties as the most meaningful outcome of their shared suffering. This desire is deeply etched into all of the surviving prisoners from the concentration camps, prisons, and Gestapo institutions.

The rest of the document consisted of practical demands around which to unite Hamburgs fragmented labor movement.

Antifas enjoyed varying degrees of success depending on the composition of the local movement and the amount of leeway allowed to them by occupying powers. Despite forming outside of the Allied administration and pushing forward popular de-Nazification policies against occupying forces who sought reconciliation with the old authorities, they were in no position to contest Allied hegemony and represented militant minorities at best.

The southwestern industrial city of Stuttgart, for example, was fortunate enough to be involved in territorial maneuvering between the United States and France, which occupied the city preemptively. Keen to avoid civil unrest and thus give the Americans a pretext to take it back, French authorities allowed Stuttgarts antifascists considerable leeway in dismantling the Nazi-era German Labor Front (DAF), rebuilding shop-floor organization in the factories, and organizing the population in cross-party antifascist alliances.

Stuttgart is also noteworthy for the presence of the Communist Party (Opposition), or KPO. This group around former KPD leaders August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler had recruited a large number of the citys mid-level KPD factory activists and functionaries following that partys ultra-left turn in 1929. The KPOs vocal advocacy for an anti-Nazi front of all workers organizations in the run-up to 1933 allowed it to consolidate a small but considerable base of experienced Communist cadre repulsed by the Stalinization of their party.

Although never a mass organization and only a shadow of its former self after the war, what remained of the KPO had a decisive influence over Stuttgarts metal workers union for several years and was able to play a role in the factories. These activists and others provided the city with a core of capable militants who understood, through experience, the need to unite workers on a cross-party basis around basic social demands.

Like everywhere else in Germany, Stuttgarts Antifa movement was soon neutralized and diverted back into the old divisions between SPD and KPD, but the citys rebellious tradition and penchant for unity in action would reemerge in 1948, when widespread anger at drastic price rises triggered a citywide general strike that encompassed 79 percent of the workforce and spread to several other localities.

The Antifa movement faced an almost impossible situation in 1945. The country lay in ruins in every sense imaginable, and had gone through a phase of destruction, brutality, and wanton murder unprecedented in scale.

The Antifas predicament was by and large overdetermined, in the sense that historical forces beyond their control would ultimately seal their fate. These socialists and antifascists, though numbering in the tens of thousands across the country, could not have been expected to provide a plausible political alternative to the overwhelming might of the Cold War.

Germany in 1945 was set to become the staging ground for the longest geopolitical confrontation in modern history, and there was no way the fragments of a shattered socialist movement could have influenced developments in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, statements and documents from the time reveal thousands of determined antifascists and socialists, keenly aware of the unprecedented nature of their historical moment and putting forward a political perspective for what remained of the countrys working class.

Although their numbers were comparatively and regrettably few given the movements former glory, their existence refutes the notion that the prewar German left was entirely destroyed by Nazism. Hitler certainly broke the back of German socialism, but West Germanys postwar prosperity laced with anti-Communist paranoia would finally bury what remained of the countrys radical prewar traditions.

Albrecht Lein recounts how the incredibly difficult conditions facing the Antifa also necessarily restricted their political perspective. Though they attracted thousands of socialists and were soon bolstered by returning Communists and other political prisoners from the concentration camps, briefly becoming the dominant political force in cities like Braunschweig, they were unable to offer a political road out of the countrys social misery.

Lein argues that the labor movements failure to defeat Hitler and the fact that Germany had required liberation from without drove antifascists to a largely reactive policy, vigorously pursuing former Nazi officials and purging society of collaborators, but neglecting to build a plausible vision for a new Germany beyond both fascism and Cold War machinations.

After the Communists dissolved the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD) in the weeks after the war, underground Nazi resistance groups began calling themselves the Movement for a Free Germany. Lein argues that this circumstance was symbolic of the overall political trajectory at the time: Other than the notable exceptions of Leipzig, Berlin and Munich, the antifascist movements described themselves as fighting organizations against fascism, and not as Committees for a Free Germany. Leaving the task of gathering social forces for liberation and thus, implicitly, renewing Germany to the Nazis and reactionaries characterized […] their defensive position.

Germans failure to engage in popular resistance to Hitler even in the second half of the war understandably demoralized the Left and shook its faith in the masses capabilities a trait historian Martin Sabrow also ascribes to the caste of Communist functionaries operating under Soviet tutelage in the East.

In the French, British, and American zones, Antifas began to recede by the late summer of 1945, marginalized by Allied bans on political organization and re-emerging divisions within the movement itself. The Social Democratic leadership under Kurt Schumacher sided with the Western occupiers and returned the party to its prewar anti-Communist line by the end of the year, decreeing that SPD membership was incompatible with participation in the Antifa movement.

In Stuttgart, the Antifa and what remained of the old trade union bureaucracy fought each other for political influence from the outset. The old leadership of the ADGB, prewar Germanys central trade union federation, sought to reestablish formalized employment relations in the occupied zones, which would at least mean a return to normalcy for Germanys working class. This ran counter to the approach of the Antifas, however, who cultivated strong ties to leftist shop stewards and factory committees, and usually called for nationalization and worker control of industry. These demands were ultimately not realistic in a shattered economy occupied by powerful foreign armies.

The prospect of stability and a degree of economic recovery under the SPD simply proved more appealing to workers forced to choose between that and the principled but harrowing struggle put forward by the Antifa.

Antifas were further hindered by the decision by the Allies, particularly the United States and Britain, to cooperate with what remained of the Nazi regime below its most executive levels. Antifas seeking to imprison local Nazi leaders or purge municipal bureaucracies were often stopped by occupying authorities who preferred to integrate functionaries of the old state into new, ostensibly democratic institutions.

This had less to do with any particular affinity between the Allies and ex-fascist functionaries so much as it served the practical interests of keeping German society running under exceedingly difficult conditions without ceding influence to the reemerging radical left. Outnumbered and outgunned by the occupying powers and outmaneuvered by the SPD, the Antifas influence in the three western zones of occupation would evaporate in less than a year. West German society stabilized, the Cold War polarized the continent, and the political forces of old Germany in alliance with Social Democracy and the emerging Western bloc consolidated their hold over the country.

The KPD, for its part, initially took on waves of new members, as its prestige rose in light of the Soviet victory over Hitler and broad anticapitalist sentiment. The party soon rebuilt its industrial bases, and by 1946 controlled just as many shop floor committees in the heavily industrialized Ruhr Region as the SPD. In his classic study of the German labor movement, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung, German scholar Arno Klnne places its total membership in the three Western zones of occupation at three hundred thousand in 1947, and six hundred thousand in the East prior to the founding of the SED in 1946.

Following a brief period of participation in postwar provisional governments, however, the Allies sidelined the KPD, and the party soon returned to its ultra-leftist line. It sealed its political irrelevance in 1951 with the passage of Thesis 37, a position paper on labor strategy riddled with antiSocial Democratic and anti-trade-union slurs. The motion, passed at the party conference, obligated all KPD members to obey party decisions above and against trade union directives if necessary. This move obliterated Communist support in the factories veritably overnight and relegated the party to societys fringes. It failed to re-enter parliament in the 1953 elections and was banned by the West German government outright in 1956.

Developments were markedly different in the Soviet zone, but ultimately ended in perhaps an even grimmer dead end: that of SED leader Walter Ulbrichts thoroughly Stalinized German Democratic Republic (GDR). An old-school Communist cadre from the partys early years, Ulbricht had survived twenty years of Stalinist purges and fascist repression to lead the Ulbricht Group, a team of exiled KPD functionaries who now returned from Moscow to rebuild the country under Soviet occupation.

Though the Red Army generals certainly did not have a particularly democratic or egalitarian vision for East Germany in mind, they rejected cooperation with the old Nazi hierarchy for their own reasons and for a while permitted Antifas and related institutions to operate relatively freely. Eyewitness accounts from as late as 1947 report of factories in East Germanys prewar industrial centers like Halle (traditional Communist strongholds) where KPD-led works councils exerted a decisive influence over factory life, confident enough to conduct negotiations and argue with Soviet authorities in some instances.

In an interview with Jacobin to be published later this year, veteran KPO activist Theodor Bergmann tells of Heinrich Adam, prewar KPO member and mechanic at the Zeiss optics factory in Jena who joined the SED in hopes of realizing socialist unity. Heinrich was an active Antifa and trade unionist who organized protests against the Soviets decision to take the Zeiss factory as war reparations (he suggested building a new factory in Russia instead). Adam was kicked out of the party for his independent views in 1952, although never persecuted, and lived out his days in Jena on a modest state pension for antifascist veterans.

In Dresden, a group of roughly eighty Communists, Social Democrats, and members of the left-social democratic Socialist Workers Party (SAP) formed a committee in May 1945 to surrender the city to the Red Army, citing broadcasts from the NKFD as inspiration. In cooperation with Soviet authorities, this group subsequently raided food and weapons stores from the German Labor Front and other Nazi institutions, and organized a distribution system for the citys populace in the first postwar weeks.

Reports from Soviet officials and the Ulbricht Group describe rival antifascist groups, generally tolerated by the occupation, which beyond arming residents and organizing shooting practice also arrested local Nazis and opened soup kitchens for refugees from the eastern provinces. Internal communications reveal that leading Communists thought little of the Antifa, dismissed by Ulbricht as the antifascist sects in a communiqu to Georgi Dimitrov in mid-1945.

The Ulbricht Groups initial goal was to incorporate as many of these antifascists into the KPD as possible, and feared that repression would repel rather than attract them. Former Ulbricht Group member Wolfgang Leonhard would later claim in his memoirs, Child of the Revolution, that Ulbricht explained to fellow Communist functionaries: Its quite clear its got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.

This period ended as the German Democratic Republic began to establish itself as a Soviet-style one-party state in the late 1940s, particularly after relatively free elections in 1946 delivered disappointing returns. Former KPO members and other oppositionists permitted to join after the war were investigated for past political crimes, purged, and often imprisoned. In the workplaces, the SED sought to rationalize production and thus neutralize the instances of factory control and democratic representation that had emerged.

The establishment of the Free German Trade Federation (FDGB) in 1946 marked the beginning of the SEDs attempt to establish party control over the factories. These unions in fact organized East German workers in line with the interests of their practical bosses, the East German state, and sought to buy their loyalty through socialist competition schemes, piece work, and union-sponsored vacation packages.

However, the free unions could not afford to phase out competitive elections overnight. Antifa activists were often elected to FDGB shop floor committees in early the years, thus exercising continued influence in the workplace for a bit longer. Some were integrated into mid-level management, while others refused to betray their principles and stepped down or were removed for political reasons.

The public split between the Soviet Union and Titos Yugoslavia in 1948 accelerated Stalinization in the Soviet occupation zone, and these limited spaces of self-organization were soon shut down entirely. Subsequently, the GDRs antifascist tradition would be diluted, distorted, and refashioned into an ahistorical national origins myth in which the citizens of East Germany were officially proclaimed the victors of history, but where little space remained for the real and complicated history, not to mention ambivalent role of Stalinized Communism, behind it.

Following their collapse in late 1945 and early 1946, Antifas would disappear from the German political stage for nearly four decades. The modern Antifa with which most people associate the term has no practical historical connection to the movement from which it takes its name, but is instead a product of West Germanys squatter scene and autonomist movement in the 1980s itself a unique outgrowth of 1968 considerably less oriented towards the industrial working class than its Italian counterpart. The first Antifas functioned as platforms to organize against far-right groups like the National Democratic Party (NPD) in an autonomist movement still numbering in the tens of thousands of active members and capable of occupying entire city blocks in some West German metropoles.

As the far right began to rebuild in the wake of German reunification, expressed in shocking mob attacks against asylum-seekers in several eastern provinces in the early 1990s, Antifa increasingly became a movement unto itself: a national network of dedicated antifascist groups organized into the Antifaschistische Aktion/Bundesweite Organisation (AA/BO).

In some ways, these groups were the inverse of their progenitors: rather than a broad alliance of socialists and progressives from separate, ideologically distinct currents, they were single-issue groups, expressly radical but vague and deeply heterogeneous in their specifics. Rather than a point of departure for young activists into a broader socialist and political left, Antifas outside of major cities are often the only political game in town, and function as a counter-cultural space with their own fashion styles, music scenes, and slang, rather than a component of a rooted mass movement within wider society.

After the AA/BO split in 2001, Antifas continued to work locally and regionally as dedicated networks of antifascists opposing far-right demonstrations and gatherings, though many also take up other left-wing issues and causes. What remains of the squats and infrastructure built up between the 1970s and 1990s continue to serve as important organizing and socializing spaces for the radical left, and Antifa as movement, trope, and general political outlook will no doubt continue to exist for quite some time but it would appear that this iteration of antifascism has also exhausted its political repertoire.

The movement has shrunken continuously since the late 1990s, fragmented across ideological lines and unable to adjust its original autonomist strategies to shifting patterns of urbanization and the rise of right-populism. Its most promising products of late the mass mobilizations against neo-Nazi marches in cities like Dresden, as well as the formation of a new, distinctively post-autonomist current in the form of the Interventionist Left mark a departure from rather than a revival of classical Antifa strategy.

Antifascism has surged to the fore of debates on the American left under Trumps presidency, and many of the tactics and visual styles of the German Antifa can be seen emerging in cities like Berkeley and elsewhere. Some argue that with the arrival of European-style neo-fascist movements on American shores, it is also time to import European Antifa tactics in response.

Yet the Antifa of today is not a product of a political victory from which we can draw our own strength, but of defeat socialisms defeat at the hands of Nazism and resurgent global capitalism, and later the exhaustion of the autonomist movement in the wake of the neoliberal turn and the sweeping gentrification of many German cities.

Although Antifas continue to function as important poles of attraction for radicalizing youth and guarantee that the far right rarely goes unopposed in many European countries, its political form is of an exclusive nature, couched in its own aesthetic and rhetorical style and inaccessible to the masses of uninitiated people getting involved in activism for the first time. A left-wing subculture with its own social spaces and cultural life is not the same thing as a mass social movement, and we cannot afford to confuse the two.

Of course, the Antifas experience in 1945 offers us equally few concrete lessons for how to fight a resurgent far right in the Trump era. Looking back at the history of the socialist left is not about distilling victorious formulas to be reproduced in the twenty-first century, but rather understanding how previous generations understood their own historical moment and built political organizations in response, in order to develop our own (hopefully more successfully models) for today.

The Antifas in Stuttgart, Braunschweig, and elsewhere faced impossible odds, but still sought to articulate a series of political demands and a practical organizational vision for the radicalizing workers willing to listen. Antifas refused to capitulate to their seemingly hopeless predicament and dared to dream big. Facing an even more fragmented and weakened left than in 1945, American antifascists will have to do the same.

Older members of the crowd carried Confederate flags, while the younger, internet-driven masses wore patches with 4chans Kekistan banner. Rally-goers in homemade armor and semi-automatic rifles paced Houstons Hermann Park, waiting for an enemy to appear.

The crowd, several hundred strong, gathered in the park on Saturday to defend a statue of Sam Houston, a slaveholder. They had gathered in response to reports that leftist protesters had planned a rally to remove the statue, despite Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner publicly stating that removing the statue wasnt even on my agenda. But as sniper rifles and Infowars-branded jackets crowded the park, it became evident that the left protesters were not coming. They had never planned to come. The rumors of an antifa protest were actually a hoax, orchestrated by an anti-left group defending Confederate monuments.

The rally began, as so many armed conflicts do, with Facebook posts.

Were about to have a huge event in Houston June 10 with the combined forces of several large groups, perhaps our biggest ever, the page Texas Antifa (short for anti-fascists) posted on May 18. The Fascists better not show up with violence or they will be limping home bruised, broken, hurt, and crying with their tails tucked between their legs.

The Texas Antifa is not a real group. The page is the latest in a growing genre of anti-antifa hoaxes, perpetrated by anonymous internet users on the right. Texas conservatives still fell for it.

Antifa have emerged as a perfect bogeyman for the alt-right, who have spent years online stoking fear about violence from imaginary enemies (usually people of color), or the perceived loss of their rights (usually at the hands of liberals, feminists, or family court). In antifa, the nebulous alt-right found an equally amorphous foe, one whose members openly boasted of punching the alt-right in the face. Alt-righters who go outside began planning armed counterprotests against antifa. And alt-righters on the internet began creating fake antifa accounts to discredit the largely anonymous movement.

One such parody account, @OfficialAntifa on Twitter, stirred outrage from the general public after it tweeted pictures of vandalized cemeteries on Memorial Day, purporting to have destroyed soldiers graves in an act of protest. The images, which actually contained images of years-old graffiti, were quickly picked up by alt-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and disseminated to thousands of enraged followers. (@OfficialAntifa currently tweets anti-trans and anti-Muslim jokes.) A page purporting to be Boston Antifa drew the ire of actual New England antifa after it was revealed to be run by trolls.

In Houston, where Saturdays protests took place, multiple antifa pages claim legitimacy. The Houston Antifa appears to be the longest-running account, active since January 2016 with photos of its demonstrations dating back to that month. But theres also Antifa Texas-Oklahoma, as well as Texas Antifa (a public figure profile run by an alt-right user), Texas Antifa (a community page created last month that first advertised the June 10 protest against the Sam Houston statue), and Houston Antifa (a community page created last month that also advertised the protest and attempted to delegitimize the old Houston Antifa page).

In a Facebook messenger conversation, the older Houston Antifa page described the confusing state of affairs.

Ah the beauty and the horror of anonymous decentralized organizing, Houston Antifa told The Daily Beast.

Shortly after the Texas Antifa posted their plans to rally in Houstons Hermann Park, the Houston Antifa took to Facebook urging readers to unlike and unfollow this fake ass Texas Antifa page. Do NOT attend the June 10th Rally! This account was started a month ago and is in NO way, shape, or form affiliated with any actual Antifa Organization, PERIOD. Nice try, #MAGA chuds, go fuck yourselves.

The Houston Antifa told The Daily Beast that we are 100% positive that this group are outside actors/provocateurs and not just liberal centrists who are mistakenly proclaiming themselves Antifa.

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But just three days after the brand-new Texas Antifa page advertised its rally, the much-larger conservative group This Is Texas announced a counterprotest in response.

Antifa has come out saying they will be bringing several large (communist) groups together to host a rally around the Museum District in Houston, Texas on June 10, 2017, This Is Texas organizers wrote in a post to their nearly 4,000 members. This list includes Black Panther Party, Antifa & more. Their goal is to remove the Sam Houston statue. (This Is Texas did not return The Daily Beasts request for comment.)

But the so-called Texas Antifas goal was actually the opposite. The page was secretly run by a group claiming to be affiliated with the hacktivist collective Anonymous. In a Facebook conversation with The Daily Beast, the group claimed to have 11 members, although it refused to offer proof that it was affiliated with a larger Anonymous group.

In a video uploaded to the Texas Antifa YouTube channel (not to an Anonymous account) on June 7, the group declared that they had actually created the page as a hoax to drive gun-toting conservatives to defend the Sam Houston statue, which Houstons mayor has stated is not being considered for removal.

It was always an Anonymous event to drive support and attention to an expired Texas law that protected its historical monuments, the group said in its video. It never made it to the floor because the Democrats used a filibuster to run out the time so it could not be voted on.

The right rarely has but 5-30 people at any given event, the Texas Antifa page told The Daily Beast. We gave them a well known enemy, a righteous cause, and an immediate threat.

Some local media saw through the hoax. The Houston Press Craig Malisow debunked the Texas Antifa page as an alt-right prank on June 1, although the pages moderators, still proclaiming their authenticity, took to Facebook to attack Malisow by name.

The other group only partially duped were alt-righters who were better acquainted with internet hoaxes.

This is from a shitty satire page, a 4chan user posted last week about the alleged antifa rally, ignore it.

The normies are gethering [sic] in Houston, another 4chan poster wrote the day of the event. Proof that America can be trolled into being great again.

The statue defenders stormed the park, ready to defend themselves against the antifa and Black Panthers they had been told would be rallying. One young attendee, who was wearing an undersized Roman-style chestplate over makeshift military fatigues with a 4chan arm patch told the Houston Chronicles Evan Mintz that hed donned the armor out of fear that antifa would stab him.

But no leftists appeared. Outside the amplification chamber of the internet, the rally goers were just a crowd of people wearing ill-fitting armor to the park on a sweltering Texas day.

After the crowd ambled home, This Is Texas leaders returned to Facebook to address allegations that the whole event had been driven by a hoax.

For those who didnt know Antifa showed up and was putting on their mask in the bathroom by the amphitheater, once they turned the corner & saw the crowd they thought twice about it, the group posted. The [sic] did tag downtown up with posters on street signs & the metro rail area. So to those that said this is a hoax, maybe think twice before you speak next time.

The Houston Antifa said it was possible that the rally goers had spotted some antifa on their way to counterprotest at a nearby anti-Islam event, though its members had agreed to skip the hoax-driven in the park.

At least one This Is Texas organizer realized the makeshift army had been tricked.

In a now-deleted post, a This Is Texas administrator named Dave confessed his disillusion to the pages followers.

People – you were duped, he wrote. The charges you have heard about this being based on a hoax are all true. Did you see ONE Antifa, Black Panther, Black Lives Matter, or street gang member there??? At all?? ANYWHERE???

We were told Black Panthers were mobilized from Atlanta and we were told buses and buses of antis were on their way – never saw them, Dave wrote. Oh yeah – I saw a black guy with an AR-15, dressed in black, near the restrooms and thought YES! I found them! Then he stood up and I saw a Texas flag sweat towel in his pocket.

New footage has emerged of the moment Sky News Australia commentator Andrew Bolt was attacked by apparent protesters after a book launch in Melbourne on June 6. Bolt was walking along Lygon Street in the suburb of Carlton when two disguised men charged at Bolt and threw shaving cream and glitter, according to Victoria Police. But the conservative commentator immediately responded by throwing punches at the men before they fled on foot. Credit: Facebook/Nathan cc Photography

Video of Andrew Bolt being set upon outside a Carlton Restaurant. Picture: Nathan CC Photography/Facebook

The columnist, who is employed by News Corp which also owns news.com.au, was last week approached by a number of men in a Melbourne street who appeared to violently attack the 57-year-old.

In video of the incident shared online, the men appeared to repeatedly try to punch Bolt, who fought back before being glitter-bombed by his attackers and was left covered in glitter and glue.

Antifa Australia, a leftist political protest group that stands for anti-fascism, identified the men involved as its supporters in a Facebook post where they called for Bolt to be imprisoned over the scuffle.

Reaction to the footage has ranged from congratulating the divisive commentators attackers, to calling for them to be charged.

Reaction to the incident has been varied. Picture: Nathan CC Photography/FacebookSource:Supplied

One Melbourne man has taken his disgust at the attack a step further, pleading with the federal government to declare the group behind the incident a terrorist organisation.

Avi Yemini, an outspoken gym owner and safety campaigner from Melbourne, sparked the idea and has collected more than 5000 signatures backing an online petition he plans to present to the PM.

Hes calling for Antifa to be reclassified by the government.

Following the horrific violent assault on conservative commentator, Andrew Bolt. Im calling on our government to list Antifa as a terrorist organisation and treat its members accordingly, he wrote on the change.org petition.

A change.org petition started to convince the Prime Minister to class Antifa as a Terrorist Organisation. Picture: Change.org/suppliedSource:Supplied

Mr Yemini described Antifa as the far-left organisation that have been reeking (sic) havoc across Australia, and says peaceful protests organised by nationalists have been greeted with violence from this organisation.

In his case to classify Antifa as a terrorist organisation, Mr Yemini argues the group fits in with the legislative definition of such a group.

Antifa does intimidate elements of the public to advance a political cause the nationalist movement, he argues. It has damaged property. It has caused serious danger to a person.

Melbourne Antifa responded to the petition in a statement sent to news.com.au.

If defending the interests of the working class against the violent system of fascism means we are terrorists, then we will gladly stand alongside our historic comrades in Palestine who continue the fight against zionist apartheid, and other marginalised groups around the world. We wear the label with pride, the group said.

ST. PAUL, Minn. Chaos erupted at the State Capitol Saturday afternoon as counter-protesters clashed with anti-Sharia Law rally goers.

Alpha News reported last week of the ACT for America protest at Minnesotas Capitol building where pro-Trump supporters were planning to join together and rally against Sharia Law entering the United States.

However, the Twin Cities General Defense Fund, ANTIFA, Students for a Democratic Society the University of Minnesota Chapter, along with several other groups showed up to rally, standing on the Capitol steps protesting those inside and supporting the Muslim community. Several hundred people joined the counter-protest outside in near triple digit heat.

Several leaders of local groups came out to counter what they called anti-Muslim rhetoric, but organizers of the event say protesters outside had it wrong.

Ben Harris, one of the organizers of the anti-Sharia Law protest in St. Paul, told Alpha News that the event is anti-Sharia, not anti-Muslim. They are protesting things like female genital mutilations and honor killings, stating they dont hate or have a problem with Muslims. Approximately 100 people attended the event. Harris also told Alpha News that he attempted to reach out to organizers of the counter-protest on several occasions to create an open dialogue and have a peaceful discussion, but received no response.

Jaylani Hussein, Director for Center of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) spoke to the crowd and welcomed both counter-protesters and those inside the Capitol rallying against Sharia Law to join them at a mosque later in the evening to celebrate a meal in a block party style celebration in honor of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Organizers insured security was tight with several dozen officers on hand from various law enforcement agencies around the Twin Cities to provide support.

Counter-protesters remained peaceful until approximately 1:00 p.m., when a group of anti-Sharia Law supporters came with signs in hand, standing at the end of the Capitol Mall. As soon as the signs appeared, protesters rushed towards the end of the Mall where chaos ensued.

Seven people were arrested on Capitol grounds, five from the counter-protest group.

Water bottles and pieces of paper were thrown at anti-Sharia Law supporters. Several fights broke out between supporters and counter-protesters, but officers were quick to break them up.

Counter-protesters were quick to turn on law enforcement and media for covering the anti-Sharia law protesters shouting, Why are you protecting the Nazis? One counter-protester shouted at a cameraman, Stop normalizing them!

Counter-protesters attacked me personally after police escorted the anti-Sharia Law supporters into a nearby building.

While following counter-protesters back to the Capitol, a young man, who was part of the security team hired by ANTIFA, approached me asking, Who do you work for? I responded Alpha News stating, we cover Minnesota politics. He told me I needed to leave, in which I replied, I have a right to be here, this is a public place.

He then grabbed my work phone, which was mounted on a portable selfie-stick, shoved me out of the way and threw the phone several feet away, in front of a line of State Patrol Officers. The screen was completely shattered, but still recording.

As I went to pick the phone up, I asked the officers, Did you see that? Arent you going to do anything? They didnt respond, just smiled. They then confirmed that I could file a police report with St. Paul Police.

I walked back toward the crowd continuing to film. A younger black man then started harassing me, threatening me, and telling me to get lost. I ignored him and continued to film until they disbanded. As I walked back, another member of ANTIFA stole my personal cell phone. They apparently turned it off so I would not be able to track it.

As I walked back to my car, I asked a state trooper if law enforcement was stationed around Capitol grounds, as I had parked near the light rail station. He told me that there were officers around, but I did not see any.

As I sat in my car, I saw several members of the counter-protest. A white man, who also worked security for ANTIFA, a white woman with green streaks in her blonde hair, and a black woman with red highlights approached my car and banged on my window yelling at me, You need to get out of here or youre going to get trouble. They began to taking photos of me and waving people over. At that moment, I sped off.

In recent months theres been a rise of news stories that start something like this: Black-clad antifa members clashed with member of an alt-right free speech rally in some city in some state. But what is antifa?

Antifa is short for anti-fascist. Its a loose collection of people looking to resist or tamp down people they view as fascists. The group doesnt have a central ideology their view of who are fascists range from President Donald Trump and his supporters to a narrower view, which includes just fringe parts of the alt-right that subscribe to bigoted or neo-nazi ideologies. The movements current iteration can be traced to parts of the Occupy Movement and anti-globalist protests in the early 2000s. The idea in general is rooted in mid- 20thcentury local Europeanresistance to fascist regimes like that of Benito Mussolini in Italy.

One piece of the antifa movement is countering fascism with violence or the threat of violence, hence the clashes that happen with members of the alt-right. The movement is also anti-racist according to several different online chapters of the movement including Antifa International. Members of antifa typically wear all black, calling themselves the black bloc, and wear masks.

Protesters hold a banner during a demonstration against a traditional annual right wing fraternity ball in Vienna January 27, 2012. The banner reads, “Antifa means attack”. Photo: Leonhard Foeger /REUTERS

The New York Times writer Farah Stockman describes antifa this way:

Little known to practitioners of mainstream American politics, militant anti-fascists make up a secretive culture closely associated with anarchists. Both reject social hierarchies as undemocratic and eschew the political parties as hopelessly corrupt, according to interviews with a dozen anarchists around the country. While some anarchists espouse nonviolence, others view property damage and even physical attacks on the far right as important tactics.

Antifa was described this way in left-leaning magazine The Nation:

Antifa doesnt only delineate that which opposes fascism. It is a set of tactics and practices that have developed since the early 20th century (and the rise of fascism in Italy) as a confrontational response to fascist groups, rooted in militant left-wing and anarchist politics.

Right-leaning magazine, the National Review described the movement this way:

Under the aegis of anti-fascism, leftist thugs have appointed themselves adjudicators of the fates of Richard Spencer, Heather MacDonald, the limo owner or Trump voter anyone they ‘dont like’ and in this lawless realm, whatever crimes Antifa commit are not crimes, and their victims are not victims the Antifa ideology can produce only enemies.

Richard Spencer is a white supremacist who was punched by an antifa member while doing a television interview near the Trump inauguration. Heather MacDonald is a pro-police author whose appearance at Claremont McKenna College was disrupted by protesters in April.

Antifa protests reached national news most prominently in several instances in Berkley, California this year. On April 15, Antifa activists clashed with Trump supporters and members of much more far-right groups, including white nationalists. Antifa also showed up at protests in Berkeley that prevented right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from giving a planned talk at the University of California, Berkeley. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter was also prevented from speaking at the college due to threats of violence.

Police in Pennsylvanias state capital said a member of the leftist antifa group known for assaulting supporters of Republican President Donald Trump at rallies across the country was arrested after using a flagpole with a silver nail at the top to hit a state troopers horse in the neck at a demonstration Saturday. AuthoritieschargedLisa Joy Simon, 23, with aggravated assault to police, taunting a police animal, prohibited offensive weapons, obstruction to law enforcement function, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. She was arraigned and taken to Dauphin County Prison in lieu of $100,000 bail, WPMT-TV reported. Harrisburg police said Simon was among antifa members protesting those marching against Islamic Shariah Law an event that took place in more than20 U.S. cities Saturday and drew similar counter-protests. Shortly after 11:30 a.m. EDT, multiple mounted Pennsylvania State Police Troopers and Harrisburg police were attempting to control the crowd when police said Simon attacked a troopers horse named Sampson with the flag pole. State police told PennLive other protesters were seen carrying weapons such as sharpened bamboo poles and baseball bats. Police said the horse was able to continue working with minimal injury. Pennsylvania State Police on Wednesday told TheBlaze the alleged attack was a swipe against the horse and that the animals skin was not broken. Heres what the South Jersey ANTIFA Facebook page had to say about the incident, according to WPMT: A comrade was arrested while trying to demonstrate against an anti-Muslim rally in Harrisburg, PA. The charges are entirely fabricated and do not reflect what actually happened during the incident. The bail is set at an extraordinary $100,000. It is clear that this person is being held as a political prisoner, and we must make it known that we will not be intimidated by a militarized police, that we will remain resolute in standing by the values of our movement, and that we will continue to combat fascism wherever it attempts to spread. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for July 6, the station said. (H/T: Heat Street)

A Philadelphia woman attending an ACT for America rally in Harrisburg was arrested last weekend when she allegedly struck a Pennsylvania State Police horse in the side of the neck with a flag pole. According to police, Lisa Joy Simon, 23, was arrested on Saturday after she used a flag pole with a silver nail at the top of the pole to strike a police horse named Sampson in the neck at about 11:32 a.m. Simon was in attendance, police said, at one of several marches held in protest of alleged Sharia law across the country last weekend organized by the conservative group ACT for America. An ACT spokeswoman said Simon was not one of their members and was in attendance as part of a counterprotest. “Our people are normally very respectful of the police. I dont think they would purposefully stab a police horse in the neck,” spokeswoman Carrie French said. “It really sounds out of character for our people. Other reports have said she was with Antifa.” Law enforcement officials said the rally marchers headed north on North ThirdStreet into Harrisburgs midtown area, and multiple Pennsylvania State Police mounted units were working to keep the marchers from blocking the 1200 block of North SixthStreet. At that time, police said, Simon struck the police horse, Sampson, in the neck and obstructed other officers from being able to move the crowd onto the sidewalk along that block. After the incident, police said that the officer and Sampson were able to continue to work after suffering only a minimal injury. Simon was arrested and charged with assault to police,taunting police animals,prohibited offensive weapons,obstruction to law enforcement function, resisting arrest anddisorderly conduct.

ANALYSIS/OPINION: The first skirmishes of a second American civil war have begun. No, this is not a metaphorical analogy to that bloody conflict that killed approximately 620,000 Americans. It is an objective statement of the reality in America. Since the election of 2016, the left has gone crazy. Their version of the tea party is called Resistance, and the spearhead of that is a loosely formed terrorist group called Antifa. Antifa is short for Anti-Fascist. The irony of their name is not lost on those who actually know history, as their tactics are straight from the fascist playbook. In the past few months, these groups have repeatedly disrupted peaceful pro-Trump rallies. They have called for and used violence against people who support the president or disagree with them and even against members of the media who will report things Antifa doesnt want reported. Just a few days ago, a woman associated with Antifa attacked a police horse, using a flagpole with nails extending from it. At the same incident in Pennsylvania, other Antifa terrorists had sharpened bamboo poles and baseball bats. Conservatives and those perceived to be conservatives have been attacked. The weapons have included glitter-filled gel, urine bombs, chains, bicycle locks and baseball bats. As their violence becomes more intense, it is now only a question of when, not if, someone will be killed. Violence is not limited to pro-Trump rallies. The same Antifa group has made college campuses virtually no-go zones for conservatives. Noted conservatives such as Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro cannot go onto many college campuses to speak without having their events disrupted to the point where they cannot go on. If this violence continues, the choices are not good. The left-wing academic establishment has quickly surrendered to these groups. They are allowed to riot on campus and even given relief from homework and exams so they can riot. Is there a solution short of a real, violent civil war in America? California and Hawaii have recently announced that they would sign agreements with other nations so they could join the Paris climate change accord. Liberal states have this amazing ability to find things in the U.S. Constitution that people havent been able to find for over 200 years, but they ignore the plain language of the document that organizes the United States of America. At this point, is there any way that America can hold together as a single, united country? When states are wanting to sign their own treaties with other nations and when one-half of the political spectrum in this nation wants to strip the other half of its rights and engage in violence against them, survival seems improbable. After Donald Trump was elected as president, the hashtag #Calexit started trending on social media. Members of the radical left pushed the idea of California leaving the United States. That idea was tried once before with less-than-great results, but maybe it is time for a peaceful solution that would allow California to leave the Union. There was a time when Americans, despite their differences, clearly identified as Americans above all else. That time has now passed. Judson Phillips is the founder of Tea Party Nation, one of the largest tea party groups in the country and the No. 1 national tea party site on the internet.

A Philadelphia member of Antifa, the anti-fascist protest group thats caused a number of incidents across the country in its effort to resist President Donald Trump, is in jail after she allegedly attacked and stabbed a Pennsylvania police horse. The horse, Sampson, and his human partner were part of a small group of Pennsylvania State Trooper mounted police, performing crowd control at a March Against Sharia on Saturday. Lisa Simon, an Antifa counter-protester of the March, reportedly attacked the horse with a flag pole that had a nail driven into one end in an effort to get the horse to run, causing chaos in the crowd, according to law enforcement. Simon stabbed the horse in the neck with the weapon, but the horse was able to keep composure and continued to work despite his injury. Simon, realizing she had not made headway in her effort, then attempted to obstruct police from moving the crowd along the block where they were working. She is now is facing a host of charges, including aggravated assault, illegally taunting a police animal, prohibited offensive weapons, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstruction of administrative law. She was arraigned Tuesday, and is currently being held on $100,000 bail. Antifa, of course, disputes that Simon did anything and is urging their comrades-in-arms to rally to her defense on their Facebook page. A comrade was arrested while trying to demonstrate against an anti-Muslim rally in Harrisburg, PA. The charges are entirely fabricated and do not reflect what actually happened during the incident, their statement says, going on to describe Simon as a political prisoner, and the charges as fabricated. They also say they will continue to abide by the values of their movement, which include anti-corporatismwhich apparently doesnt include not posting on a heavily corporate social media network. Sampson, the horse, is said to be recovering and is still able to work.

The origins of the word antifa shorthand for decentralized, militant street activism associated with its own aesthetic and subculture might be murky to most readers. Even in Germany, few know much about the popular forms of antifascist resistance that coined the term. The movements short but inspiring political legacy proved too uncomfortable for both Cold War-era German states, and was ignored in schools and mainstream history. Today its legacy is almost entirely lost to the Left. By 1945, Hitlers Third Reich lay physically destroyed and politically exhausted. Basic civil society ceased to function in many areas, as the Nazi grip on power faltered and regime supporters, particularly in the middle- and upper classes, realized that Hitlers final victory was a fantasy. On the Left, many Communists and Social Democrats had either been outright murdered by the Nazis, or died in the ensuing war. The unimaginable human and material destruction wrought by Nazi rule killed millions and turned German society upside down, decimating the labor movement and murdering most of the countrys Jewish population. Millions who had supported or at least acquiesced to the regime including many workers and even some former socialists now faced a new beginning in unknown political terrain. Yet despite its failure to stop Hitler in 1933 and veritable dismantling in subsequent years, Germanys socialist labor movement and its decidedly progressive traditions outlived Hitler in the factories of its industrial cities, and began gathering up the fragments as soon as open political activity became possible. As historian Gareth Dale describes: Of all sectors of the population, it was industrial workers in the major towns that showed the greatest immunity to Nazism. Many trade unionists and socialists were able to maintain their traditions and beliefs, at least in some form, through the Nazi era. A courageous minority, including some 150,000 Communists, took part in illegal resistance. Wider layers avoided danger but were able to keep labour movement values and memories alive amongst groups of friends, in workplaces and on housing estates. These groups, oftentimes launched from the aforementioned housing estates, were generally called Antifaschistische Ausschsse, Antifaschistische Kommittees, or the now famous Antifaschistische Aktion Antifa for short. They drew on the slogans and orientation of the prewar united front strategy, adopting the word Antifa from a last-ditch attempt to establish a cross-party alliance between Communist and Social Democratic workers in 1932. The alliances iconic logo, devised by Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists members Max Keilson and Max Gebhard, has been since become one of the Lefts most well-known symbols. After the war, Antifas varied in size and composition across the former Reich, now divided into four zones of occupation, and developed in interaction with the local occupying power. Emerging seemingly overnight in dozens of cities, most formed immediately after Allied forces arrived, while some such as the group in Wuppertal liberated themselves in street battles with Hitler loyalists before the Allies could. Pivotally, these circles were not spontaneous instances of solidarization between traumatized war survivors, but the product of Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Communist Party (KPD) veterans reactivating prewar networks. Albrecht Lein reports that the core of the Braunschweig Antifa was made up of KPD and SPD members in their forties and fifties who had avoided the front, though Catholic workers organizations and other forces were also involved. The Antifa groups numbered between several hundred and several thousand active members in most cities, while the openly decried lack of youth involvement can be ascribed to twelve years of Nazi education and socialization, which annihilated the once widespread proletarian-socialist attitude among most young Germans. Though the material needs of war and reconstruction incorporated women into economic life in new ways, the male dominance characteristic of German society at the time was also reflected in the Antifa movement, which consisted largely (but not entirely) of men. Antifas tended to focus on a combination of hunting down Nazi criminals and underground Nazi partisans (the so-called Werewolves) and practical concerns affecting the general population. Braunschweigs Antifa, for example, printed a twelve-point program demanding, among other things, the removal of Nazis from all administrative bodies and their immediate replacement with competent antifascists, liquidation of Nazi assets to provide for war victims, emergency laws to prosecute local fascists, and the reestablishment of the public health-care service. Typical of an organization led by socialists and thus keenly aware of the need for print media as an organizing medium, the programs twelfth and final point consisted bluntly of a Daily newspaper. Although surviving records indicate that many Antifas were dominated by the KPD, the political mood in the early months was far from the Third Period adventurism of the late Weimar period. Across the board, local Antifas were motivated by a desire to learn from the mistakes of 1933 and build a non-sectarian labor movement bridging divisions. This was buoyed by a widespread sense at the wars end that the horrors of Nazism had been a result of the instability and inequality of capitalism, and that a new, egalitarian economic system was needed for the postwar order. Demands for nationalization of industry and other left-wing policies were widespread. Even the forced marriage between KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the Soviet zone drew on this sentiment and recruited many former oppositionists in the first year. In British-occupied Hamburg, a joint KPD-SPD action committee convened in July 1945 with broad support from their respective memberships to declare: The will to merge into a powerful political party lives in the hearts of the millions of supporters of the once warring German workers parties as the most meaningful outcome of their shared suffering. This desire is deeply etched into all of the surviving prisoners from the concentration camps, prisons, and Gestapo institutions. The rest of the document consisted of practical demands around which to unite Hamburgs fragmented labor movement. Antifas enjoyed varying degrees of success depending on the composition of the local movement and the amount of leeway allowed to them by occupying powers. Despite forming outside of the Allied administration and pushing forward popular de-Nazification policies against occupying forces who sought reconciliation with the old authorities, they were in no position to contest Allied hegemony and represented militant minorities at best. The southwestern industrial city of Stuttgart, for example, was fortunate enough to be involved in territorial maneuvering between the United States and France, which occupied the city preemptively. Keen to avoid civil unrest and thus give the Americans a pretext to take it back, French authorities allowed Stuttgarts antifascists considerable leeway in dismantling the Nazi-era German Labor Front (DAF), rebuilding shop-floor organization in the factories, and organizing the population in cross-party antifascist alliances. Stuttgart is also noteworthy for the presence of the Communist Party (Opposition), or KPO. This group around former KPD leaders August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler had recruited a large number of the citys mid-level KPD factory activists and functionaries following that partys ultra-left turn in 1929. The KPOs vocal advocacy for an anti-Nazi front of all workers organizations in the run-up to 1933 allowed it to consolidate a small but considerable base of experienced Communist cadre repulsed by the Stalinization of their party. Although never a mass organization and only a shadow of its former self after the war, what remained of the KPO had a decisive influence over Stuttgarts metal workers union for several years and was able to play a role in the factories. These activists and others provided the city with a core of capable militants who understood, through experience, the need to unite workers on a cross-party basis around basic social demands. Like everywhere else in Germany, Stuttgarts Antifa movement was soon neutralized and diverted back into the old divisions between SPD and KPD, but the citys rebellious tradition and penchant for unity in action would reemerge in 1948, when widespread anger at drastic price rises triggered a citywide general strike that encompassed 79 percent of the workforce and spread to several other localities. The Antifa movement faced an almost impossible situation in 1945. The country lay in ruins in every sense imaginable, and had gone through a phase of destruction, brutality, and wanton murder unprecedented in scale. The Antifas predicament was by and large overdetermined, in the sense that historical forces beyond their control would ultimately seal their fate. These socialists and antifascists, though numbering in the tens of thousands across the country, could not have been expected to provide a plausible political alternative to the overwhelming might of the Cold War. Germany in 1945 was set to become the staging ground for the longest geopolitical confrontation in modern history, and there was no way the fragments of a shattered socialist movement could have influenced developments in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, statements and documents from the time reveal thousands of determined antifascists and socialists, keenly aware of the unprecedented nature of their historical moment and putting forward a political perspective for what remained of the countrys working class. Although their numbers were comparatively and regrettably few given the movements former glory, their existence refutes the notion that the prewar German left was entirely destroyed by Nazism. Hitler certainly broke the back of German socialism, but West Germanys postwar prosperity laced with anti-Communist paranoia would finally bury what remained of the countrys radical prewar traditions. Albrecht Lein recounts how the incredibly difficult conditions facing the Antifa also necessarily restricted their political perspective. Though they attracted thousands of socialists and were soon bolstered by returning Communists and other political prisoners from the concentration camps, briefly becoming the dominant political force in cities like Braunschweig, they were unable to offer a political road out of the countrys social misery. Lein argues that the labor movements failure to defeat Hitler and the fact that Germany had required liberation from without drove antifascists to a largely reactive policy, vigorously pursuing former Nazi officials and purging society of collaborators, but neglecting to build a plausible vision for a new Germany beyond both fascism and Cold War machinations. After the Communists dissolved the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD) in the weeks after the war, underground Nazi resistance groups began calling themselves the Movement for a Free Germany. Lein argues that this circumstance was symbolic of the overall political trajectory at the time: Other than the notable exceptions of Leipzig, Berlin and Munich, the antifascist movements described themselves as fighting organizations against fascism, and not as Committees for a Free Germany. Leaving the task of gathering social forces for liberation and thus, implicitly, renewing Germany to the Nazis and reactionaries characterized their defensive position. Germans failure to engage in popular resistance to Hitler even in the second half of the war understandably demoralized the Left and shook its faith in the masses capabilities a trait historian Martin Sabrow also ascribes to the caste of Communist functionaries operating under Soviet tutelage in the East. In the French, British, and American zones, Antifas began to recede by the late summer of 1945, marginalized by Allied bans on political organization and re-emerging divisions within the movement itself. The Social Democratic leadership under Kurt Schumacher sided with the Western occupiers and returned the party to its prewar anti-Communist line by the end of the year, decreeing that SPD membership was incompatible with participation in the Antifa movement. In Stuttgart, the Antifa and what remained of the old trade union bureaucracy fought each other for political influence from the outset. The old leadership of the ADGB, prewar Germanys central trade union federation, sought to reestablish formalized employment relations in the occupied zones, which would at least mean a return to normalcy for Germanys working class. This ran counter to the approach of the Antifas, however, who cultivated strong ties to leftist shop stewards and factory committees, and usually called for nationalization and worker control of industry. These demands were ultimately not realistic in a shattered economy occupied by powerful foreign armies. The prospect of stability and a degree of economic recovery under the SPD simply proved more appealing to workers forced to choose between that and the principled but harrowing struggle put forward by the Antifa. Antifas were further hindered by the decision by the Allies, particularly the United States and Britain, to cooperate with what remained of the Nazi regime below its most executive levels. Antifas seeking to imprison local Nazi leaders or purge municipal bureaucracies were often stopped by occupying authorities who preferred to integrate functionaries of the old state into new, ostensibly democratic institutions. This had less to do with any particular affinity between the Allies and ex-fascist functionaries so much as it served the practical interests of keeping German society running under exceedingly difficult conditions without ceding influence to the reemerging radical left. Outnumbered and outgunned by the occupying powers and outmaneuvered by the SPD, the Antifas influence in the three western zones of occupation would evaporate in less than a year. West German society stabilized, the Cold War polarized the continent, and the political forces of old Germany in alliance with Social Democracy and the emerging Western bloc consolidated their hold over the country. The KPD, for its part, initially took on waves of new members, as its prestige rose in light of the Soviet victory over Hitler and broad anticapitalist sentiment. The party soon rebuilt its industrial bases, and by 1946 controlled just as many shop floor committees in the heavily industrialized Ruhr Region as the SPD. In his classic study of the German labor movement, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung, German scholar Arno Klnne places its total membership in the three Western zones of occupation at three hundred thousand in 1947, and six hundred thousand in the East prior to the founding of the SED in 1946. Following a brief period of participation in postwar provisional governments, however, the Allies sidelined the KPD, and the party soon returned to its ultra-leftist line. It sealed its political irrelevance in 1951 with the passage of Thesis 37, a position paper on labor strategy riddled with antiSocial Democratic and anti-trade-union slurs. The motion, passed at the party conference, obligated all KPD members to obey party decisions above and against trade union directives if necessary. This move obliterated Communist support in the factories veritably overnight and relegated the party to societys fringes. It failed to re-enter parliament in the 1953 elections and was banned by the West German government outright in 1956. Developments were markedly different in the Soviet zone, but ultimately ended in perhaps an even grimmer dead end: that of SED leader Walter Ulbrichts thoroughly Stalinized German Democratic Republic (GDR). An old-school Communist cadre from the partys early years, Ulbricht had survived twenty years of Stalinist purges and fascist repression to lead the Ulbricht Group, a team of exiled KPD functionaries who now returned from Moscow to rebuild the country under Soviet occupation. Though the Red Army generals certainly did not have a particularly democratic or egalitarian vision for East Germany in mind, they rejected cooperation with the old Nazi hierarchy for their own reasons and for a while permitted Antifas and related institutions to operate relatively freely. Eyewitness accounts from as late as 1947 report of factories in East Germanys prewar industrial centers like Halle (traditional Communist strongholds) where KPD-led works councils exerted a decisive influence over factory life, confident enough to conduct negotiations and argue with Soviet authorities in some instances. In an interview with Jacobin to be published later this year, veteran KPO activist Theodor Bergmann tells of Heinrich Adam, prewar KPO member and mechanic at the Zeiss optics factory in Jena who joined the SED in hopes of realizing socialist unity. Heinrich was an active Antifa and trade unionist who organized protests against the Soviets decision to take the Zeiss factory as war reparations (he suggested building a new factory in Russia instead). Adam was kicked out of the party for his independent views in 1952, although never persecuted, and lived out his days in Jena on a modest state pension for antifascist veterans. In Dresden, a group of roughly eighty Communists, Social Democrats, and members of the left-social democratic Socialist Workers Party (SAP) formed a committee in May 1945 to surrender the city to the Red Army, citing broadcasts from the NKFD as inspiration. In cooperation with Soviet authorities, this group subsequently raided food and weapons stores from the German Labor Front and other Nazi institutions, and organized a distribution system for the citys populace in the first postwar weeks. Reports from Soviet officials and the Ulbricht Group describe rival antifascist groups, generally tolerated by the occupation, which beyond arming residents and organizing shooting practice also arrested local Nazis and opened soup kitchens for refugees from the eastern provinces. Internal communications reveal that leading Communists thought little of the Antifa, dismissed by Ulbricht as the antifascist sects in a communiqu to Georgi Dimitrov in mid-1945. The Ulbricht Groups initial goal was to incorporate as many of these antifascists into the KPD as possible, and feared that repression would repel rather than attract them. Former Ulbricht Group member Wolfgang Leonhard would later claim in his memoirs, Child of the Revolution, that Ulbricht explained to fellow Communist functionaries: Its quite clear its got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control. This period ended as the German Democratic Republic began to establish itself as a Soviet-style one-party state in the late 1940s, particularly after relatively free elections in 1946 delivered disappointing returns. Former KPO members and other oppositionists permitted to join after the war were investigated for past political crimes, purged, and often imprisoned. In the workplaces, the SED sought to rationalize production and thus neutralize the instances of factory control and democratic representation that had emerged. The establishment of the Free German Trade Federation (FDGB) in 1946 marked the beginning of the SEDs attempt to establish party control over the factories. These unions in fact organized East German workers in line with the interests of their practical bosses, the East German state, and sought to buy their loyalty through socialist competition schemes, piece work, and union-sponsored vacation packages. However, the free unions could not afford to phase out competitive elections overnight. Antifa activists were often elected to FDGB shop floor committees in early the years, thus exercising continued influence in the workplace for a bit longer. Some were integrated into mid-level management, while others refused to betray their principles and stepped down or were removed for political reasons. The public split between the Soviet Union and Titos Yugoslavia in 1948 accelerated Stalinization in the Soviet occupation zone, and these limited spaces of self-organization were soon shut down entirely. Subsequently, the GDRs antifascist tradition would be diluted, distorted, and refashioned into an ahistorical national origins myth in which the citizens of East Germany were officially proclaimed the victors of history, but where little space remained for the real and complicated history, not to mention ambivalent role of Stalinized Communism, behind it. Following their collapse in late 1945 and early 1946, Antifas would disappear from the German political stage for nearly four decades. The modern Antifa with which most people associate the term has no practical historical connection to the movement from which it takes its name, but is instead a product of West Germanys squatter scene and autonomist movement in the 1980s itself a unique outgrowth of 1968 considerably less oriented towards the industrial working class than its Italian counterpart. The first Antifas functioned as platforms to organize against far-right groups like the National Democratic Party (NPD) in an autonomist movement still numbering in the tens of thousands of active members and capable of occupying entire city blocks in some West German metropoles. As the far right began to rebuild in the wake of German reunification, expressed in shocking mob attacks against asylum-seekers in several eastern provinces in the early 1990s, Antifa increasingly became a movement unto itself: a national network of dedicated antifascist groups organized into the Antifaschistische Aktion/Bundesweite Organisation (AA/BO). In some ways, these groups were the inverse of their progenitors: rather than a broad alliance of socialists and progressives from separate, ideologically distinct currents, they were single-issue groups, expressly radical but vague and deeply heterogeneous in their specifics. Rather than a point of departure for young activists into a broader socialist and political left, Antifas outside of major cities are often the only political game in town, and function as a counter-cultural space with their own fashion styles, music scenes, and slang, rather than a component of a rooted mass movement within wider society. After the AA/BO split in 2001, Antifas continued to work locally and regionally as dedicated networks of antifascists opposing far-right demonstrations and gatherings, though many also take up other left-wing issues and causes. What remains of the squats and infrastructure built up between the 1970s and 1990s continue to serve as important organizing and socializing spaces for the radical left, and Antifa as movement, trope, and general political outlook will no doubt continue to exist for quite some time but it would appear that this iteration of antifascism has also exhausted its political repertoire. The movement has shrunken continuously since the late 1990s, fragmented across ideological lines and unable to adjust its original autonomist strategies to shifting patterns of urbanization and the rise of right-populism. Its most promising products of late the mass mobilizations against neo-Nazi marches in cities like Dresden, as well as the formation of a new, distinctively post-autonomist current in the form of the Interventionist Left mark a departure from rather than a revival of classical Antifa strategy. Antifascism has surged to the fore of debates on the American left under Trumps presidency, and many of the tactics and visual styles of the German Antifa can be seen emerging in cities like Berkeley and elsewhere. Some argue that with the arrival of European-style neo-fascist movements on American shores, it is also time to import European Antifa tactics in response. Yet the Antifa of today is not a product of a political victory from which we can draw our own strength, but of defeat socialisms defeat at the hands of Nazism and resurgent global capitalism, and later the exhaustion of the autonomist movement in the wake of the neoliberal turn and the sweeping gentrification of many German cities. Although Antifas continue to function as important poles of attraction for radicalizing youth and guarantee that the far right rarely goes unopposed in many European countries, its political form is of an exclusive nature, couched in its own aesthetic and rhetorical style and inaccessible to the masses of uninitiated people getting involved in activism for the first time. A left-wing subculture with its own social spaces and cultural life is not the same thing as a mass social movement, and we cannot afford to confuse the two. Of course, the Antifas experience in 1945 offers us equally few concrete lessons for how to fight a resurgent far right in the Trump era. Looking back at the history of the socialist left is not about distilling victorious formulas to be reproduced in the twenty-first century, but rather understanding how previous generations understood their own historical moment and built political organizations in response, in order to develop our own (hopefully more successfully models) for today. The Antifas in Stuttgart, Braunschweig, and elsewhere faced impossible odds, but still sought to articulate a series of political demands and a practical organizational vision for the radicalizing workers willing to listen. Antifas refused to capitulate to their seemingly hopeless predicament and dared to dream big. Facing an even more fragmented and weakened left than in 1945, American antifascists will have to do the same.

Older members of the crowd carried Confederate flags, while the younger, internet-driven masses wore patches with 4chans Kekistan banner. Rally-goers in homemade armor and semi-automatic rifles paced Houstons Hermann Park, waiting for an enemy to appear. The crowd, several hundred strong, gathered in the park on Saturday to defend a statue of Sam Houston, a slaveholder. They had gathered in response to reports that leftist protesters had planned a rally to remove the statue, despite Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner publicly stating that removing the statue wasnt even on my agenda. But as sniper rifles and Infowars-branded jackets crowded the park, it became evident that the left protesters were not coming. They had never planned to come. The rumors of an antifa protest were actually a hoax, orchestrated by an anti-left group defending Confederate monuments. The rally began, as so many armed conflicts do, with Facebook posts. Were about to have a huge event in Houston June 10 with the combined forces of several large groups, perhaps our biggest ever, the page Texas Antifa (short for anti-fascists) posted on May 18. The Fascists better not show up with violence or they will be limping home bruised, broken, hurt, and crying with their tails tucked between their legs. The Texas Antifa is not a real group. The page is the latest in a growing genre of anti-antifa hoaxes, perpetrated by anonymous internet users on the right. Texas conservatives still fell for it. Antifa have emerged as a perfect bogeyman for the alt-right, who have spent years online stoking fear about violence from imaginary enemies (usually people of color), or the perceived loss of their rights (usually at the hands of liberals, feminists, or family court). In antifa, the nebulous alt-right found an equally amorphous foe, one whose members openly boasted of punching the alt-right in the face. Alt-righters who go outside began planning armed counterprotests against antifa. And alt-righters on the internet began creating fake antifa accounts to discredit the largely anonymous movement. One such parody account, @OfficialAntifa on Twitter, stirred outrage from the general public after it tweeted pictures of vandalized cemeteries on Memorial Day, purporting to have destroyed soldiers graves in an act of protest. The images, which actually contained images of years-old graffiti, were quickly picked up by alt-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and disseminated to thousands of enraged followers. (@OfficialAntifa currently tweets anti-trans and anti-Muslim jokes.) A page purporting to be Boston Antifa drew the ire of actual New England antifa after it was revealed to be run by trolls. In Houston, where Saturdays protests took place, multiple antifa pages claim legitimacy. The Houston Antifa appears to be the longest-running account, active since January 2016 with photos of its demonstrations dating back to that month. But theres also Antifa Texas-Oklahoma, as well as Texas Antifa (a public figure profile run by an alt-right user), Texas Antifa (a community page created last month that first advertised the June 10 protest against the Sam Houston statue), and Houston Antifa (a community page created last month that also advertised the protest and attempted to delegitimize the old Houston Antifa page). In a Facebook messenger conversation, the older Houston Antifa page described the confusing state of affairs. Ah the beauty and the horror of anonymous decentralized organizing, Houston Antifa told The Daily Beast. Shortly after the Texas Antifa posted their plans to rally in Houstons Hermann Park, the Houston Antifa took to Facebook urging readers to unlike and unfollow this fake ass Texas Antifa page. Do NOT attend the June 10th Rally! This account was started a month ago and is in NO way, shape, or form affiliated with any actual Antifa Organization, PERIOD. Nice try, #MAGA chuds, go fuck yourselves. The Houston Antifa told The Daily Beast that we are 100% positive that this group are outside actors/provocateurs and not just liberal centrists who are mistakenly proclaiming themselves Antifa. Get The Beast In Your Inbox! Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast. A speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don’t). Subscribe Thank You! You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason. But just three days after the brand-new Texas Antifa page advertised its rally, the much-larger conservative group This Is Texas announced a counterprotest in response. Antifa has come out saying they will be bringing several large (communist) groups together to host a rally around the Museum District in Houston, Texas on June 10, 2017, This Is Texas organizers wrote in a post to their nearly 4,000 members. This list includes Black Panther Party, Antifa & more. Their goal is to remove the Sam Houston statue. (This Is Texas did not return The Daily Beasts request for comment.) But the so-called Texas Antifas goal was actually the opposite. The page was secretly run by a group claiming to be affiliated with the hacktivist collective Anonymous. In a Facebook conversation with The Daily Beast, the group claimed to have 11 members, although it refused to offer proof that it was affiliated with a larger Anonymous group. In a video uploaded to the Texas Antifa YouTube channel (not to an Anonymous account) on June 7, the group declared that they had actually created the page as a hoax to drive gun-toting conservatives to defend the Sam Houston statue, which Houstons mayor has stated is not being considered for removal. It was always an Anonymous event to drive support and attention to an expired Texas law that protected its historical monuments, the group said in its video. It never made it to the floor because the Democrats used a filibuster to run out the time so it could not be voted on. The right rarely has but 5-30 people at any given event, the Texas Antifa page told The Daily Beast. We gave them a well known enemy, a righteous cause, and an immediate threat. Some local media saw through the hoax. The Houston Press Craig Malisow debunked the Texas Antifa page as an alt-right prank on June 1, although the pages moderators, still proclaiming their authenticity, took to Facebook to attack Malisow by name. The other group only partially duped were alt-righters who were better acquainted with internet hoaxes. This is from a shitty satire page, a 4chan user posted last week about the alleged antifa rally, ignore it. The normies are gethering [sic] in Houston, another 4chan poster wrote the day of the event. Proof that America can be trolled into being great again. The statue defenders stormed the park, ready to defend themselves against the antifa and Black Panthers they had been told would be rallying. One young attendee, who was wearing an undersized Roman-style chestplate over makeshift military fatigues with a 4chan arm patch told the Houston Chronicles Evan Mintz that hed donned the armor out of fear that antifa would stab him. But no leftists appeared. Outside the amplification chamber of the internet, the rally goers were just a crowd of people wearing ill-fitting armor to the park on a sweltering Texas day. After the crowd ambled home, This Is Texas leaders returned to Facebook to address allegations that the whole event had been driven by a hoax. For those who didnt know Antifa showed up and was putting on their mask in the bathroom by the amphitheater, once they turned the corner & saw the crowd they thought twice about it, the group posted. The [sic] did tag downtown up with posters on street signs & the metro rail area. So to those that said this is a hoax, maybe think twice before you speak next time. The Houston Antifa said it was possible that the rally goers had spotted some antifa on their way to counterprotest at a nearby anti-Islam event, though its members had agreed to skip the hoax-driven in the park. At least one This Is Texas organizer realized the makeshift army had been tricked. In a now-deleted post, a This Is Texas administrator named Dave confessed his disillusion to the pages followers. People – you were duped, he wrote. The charges you have heard about this being based on a hoax are all true. Did you see ONE Antifa, Black Panther, Black Lives Matter, or street gang member there??? At all?? ANYWHERE??? We were told Black Panthers were mobilized from Atlanta and we were told buses and buses of antis were on their way – never saw them, Dave wrote. Oh yeah – I saw a black guy with an AR-15, dressed in black, near the restrooms and thought YES! I found them! Then he stood up and I saw a Texas flag sweat towel in his pocket.

New footage has emerged of the moment Sky News Australia commentator Andrew Bolt was attacked by apparent protesters after a book launch in Melbourne on June 6. Bolt was walking along Lygon Street in the suburb of Carlton when two disguised men charged at Bolt and threw shaving cream and glitter, according to Victoria Police. But the conservative commentator immediately responded by throwing punches at the men before they fled on foot. Credit: Facebook/Nathan cc Photography Video of Andrew Bolt being set upon outside a Carlton Restaurant. Picture: Nathan CC Photography/Facebook PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull is being urged to declare the organisation whose members glitter-bombed conservative commentator Andrew Bolt a terrorist group. The columnist, who is employed by News Corp which also owns news.com.au, was last week approached by a number of men in a Melbourne street who appeared to violently attack the 57-year-old. In video of the incident shared online, the men appeared to repeatedly try to punch Bolt, who fought back before being glitter-bombed by his attackers and was left covered in glitter and glue. Antifa Australia, a leftist political protest group that stands for anti-fascism, identified the men involved as its supporters in a Facebook post where they called for Bolt to be imprisoned over the scuffle. Reaction to the footage has ranged from congratulating the divisive commentators attackers, to calling for them to be charged. Reaction to the incident has been varied. Picture: Nathan CC Photography/FacebookSource:Supplied One Melbourne man has taken his disgust at the attack a step further, pleading with the federal government to declare the group behind the incident a terrorist organisation. Avi Yemini, an outspoken gym owner and safety campaigner from Melbourne, sparked the idea and has collected more than 5000 signatures backing an online petition he plans to present to the PM. Hes calling for Antifa to be reclassified by the government. Following the horrific violent assault on conservative commentator, Andrew Bolt. Im calling on our government to list Antifa as a terrorist organisation and treat its members accordingly, he wrote on the change.org petition. A change.org petition started to convince the Prime Minister to class Antifa as a Terrorist Organisation. Picture: Change.org/suppliedSource:Supplied Mr Yemini described Antifa as the far-left organisation that have been reeking (sic) havoc across Australia, and says peaceful protests organised by nationalists have been greeted with violence from this organisation. In his case to classify Antifa as a terrorist organisation, Mr Yemini argues the group fits in with the legislative definition of such a group. Antifa does intimidate elements of the public to advance a political cause the nationalist movement, he argues. It has damaged property. It has caused serious danger to a person. Melbourne Antifa responded to the petition in a statement sent to news.com.au. If defending the interests of the working class against the violent system of fascism means we are terrorists, then we will gladly stand alongside our historic comrades in Palestine who continue the fight against zionist apartheid, and other marginalised groups around the world. We wear the label with pride, the group said. Mr Turnbull has not commented to the petition. Avi Yemini is running a campaign to make Victoria safe again. Picture: Chris EastmanSource:News Corp Australia

ST. PAUL, Minn. Chaos erupted at the State Capitol Saturday afternoon as counter-protesters clashed with anti-Sharia Law rally goers. Alpha News reported last week of the ACT for America protest at Minnesotas Capitol building where pro-Trump supporters were planning to join together and rally against Sharia Law entering the United States. However, the Twin Cities General Defense Fund, ANTIFA, Students for a Democratic Society the University of Minnesota Chapter, along with several other groups showed up to rally, standing on the Capitol steps protesting those inside and supporting the Muslim community. Several hundred people joined the counter-protest outside in near triple digit heat. Several leaders of local groups came out to counter what they called anti-Muslim rhetoric, but organizers of the event say protesters outside had it wrong. Ben Harris, one of the organizers of the anti-Sharia Law protest in St. Paul, told Alpha News that the event is anti-Sharia, not anti-Muslim. They are protesting things like female genital mutilations and honor killings, stating they dont hate or have a problem with Muslims. Approximately 100 people attended the event. Harris also told Alpha News that he attempted to reach out to organizers of the counter-protest on several occasions to create an open dialogue and have a peaceful discussion, but received no response. Jaylani Hussein, Director for Center of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) spoke to the crowd and welcomed both counter-protesters and those inside the Capitol rallying against Sharia Law to join them at a mosque later in the evening to celebrate a meal in a block party style celebration in honor of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Organizers insured security was tight with several dozen officers on hand from various law enforcement agencies around the Twin Cities to provide support. Counter-protesters remained peaceful until approximately 1:00 p.m., when a group of anti-Sharia Law supporters came with signs in hand, standing at the end of the Capitol Mall. As soon as the signs appeared, protesters rushed towards the end of the Mall where chaos ensued. Seven people were arrested on Capitol grounds, five from the counter-protest group. Water bottles and pieces of paper were thrown at anti-Sharia Law supporters. Several fights broke out between supporters and counter-protesters, but officers were quick to break them up. Counter-protesters were quick to turn on law enforcement and media for covering the anti-Sharia law protesters shouting, Why are you protecting the Nazis? One counter-protester shouted at a cameraman, Stop normalizing them! Counter-protesters attacked me personally after police escorted the anti-Sharia Law supporters into a nearby building. While following counter-protesters back to the Capitol, a young man, who was part of the security team hired by ANTIFA, approached me asking, Who do you work for? I responded Alpha News stating, we cover Minnesota politics. He told me I needed to leave, in which I replied, I have a right to be here, this is a public place. He then grabbed my work phone, which was mounted on a portable selfie-stick, shoved me out of the way and threw the phone several feet away, in front of a line of State Patrol Officers. The screen was completely shattered, but still recording. As I went to pick the phone up, I asked the officers, Did you see that? Arent you going to do anything? They didnt respond, just smiled. They then confirmed that I could file a police report with St. Paul Police. I walked back toward the crowd continuing to film. A younger black man then started harassing me, threatening me, and telling me to get lost. I ignored him and continued to film until they disbanded. As I walked back, another member of ANTIFA stole my personal cell phone. They apparently turned it off so I would not be able to track it. As I walked back to my car, I asked a state trooper if law enforcement was stationed around Capitol grounds, as I had parked near the light rail station. He told me that there were officers around, but I did not see any. As I sat in my car, I saw several members of the counter-protest. A white man, who also worked security for ANTIFA, a white woman with green streaks in her blonde hair, and a black woman with red highlights approached my car and banged on my window yelling at me, You need to get out of here or youre going to get trouble. They began to taking photos of me and waving people over. At that moment, I sped off. comments

In recent months theres been a rise of news stories that start something like this: Black-clad antifa members clashed with member of an alt-right free speech rally in some city in some state. But what is antifa? Antifa is short for anti-fascist. Its a loose collection of people looking to resist or tamp down people they view as fascists. The group doesnt have a central ideology their view of who are fascists range from President Donald Trump and his supporters to a narrower view, which includes just fringe parts of the alt-right that subscribe to bigoted or neo-nazi ideologies. The movements current iteration can be traced to parts of the Occupy Movement and anti-globalist protests in the early 2000s. The idea in general is rooted in mid- 20thcentury local Europeanresistance to fascist regimes like that of Benito Mussolini in Italy. READ:Princeton Professor Receives ‘Alt-Right’ Death Threats Following Trump Criticism, She Says One piece of the antifa movement is countering fascism with violence or the threat of violence, hence the clashes that happen with members of the alt-right. The movement is also anti-racist according to several different online chapters of the movement including Antifa International. Members of antifa typically wear all black, calling themselves the black bloc, and wear masks. Protesters hold a banner during a demonstration against a traditional annual right wing fraternity ball in Vienna January 27, 2012. The banner reads, “Antifa means attack”. Photo: Leonhard Foeger /REUTERS The New York Times writer Farah Stockman describes antifa this way: Little known to practitioners of mainstream American politics, militant anti-fascists make up a secretive culture closely associated with anarchists. Both reject social hierarchies as undemocratic and eschew the political parties as hopelessly corrupt, according to interviews with a dozen anarchists around the country. While some anarchists espouse nonviolence, others view property damage and even physical attacks on the far right as important tactics. Antifa was described this way in left-leaning magazine The Nation: Antifa doesnt only delineate that which opposes fascism. It is a set of tactics and practices that have developed since the early 20th century (and the rise of fascism in Italy) as a confrontational response to fascist groups, rooted in militant left-wing and anarchist politics. Right-leaning magazine, the National Review described the movement this way: Under the aegis of anti-fascism, leftist thugs have appointed themselves adjudicators of the fates of Richard Spencer, Heather MacDonald, the limo owner or Trump voter anyone they ‘dont like’ and in this lawless realm, whatever crimes Antifa commit are not crimes, and their victims are not victims the Antifa ideology can produce only enemies. READ: Pepe The Frog Meme Ban: Apple Rejects App Featuring Alt-Right Character From The App Store Richard Spencer is a white supremacist who was punched by an antifa member while doing a television interview near the Trump inauguration. Heather MacDonald is a pro-police author whose appearance at Claremont McKenna College was disrupted by protesters in April. Antifa protests reached national news most prominently in several instances in Berkley, California this year. On April 15, Antifa activists clashed with Trump supporters and members of much more far-right groups, including white nationalists. Antifa also showed up at protests in Berkeley that prevented right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from giving a planned talk at the University of California, Berkeley. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter was also prevented from speaking at the college due to threats of violence.

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